I've used Seagate w/o problems for years. But one or two people is not a good enough sample size. You should have a look at http://www.storagereview.com/. they have comprehensive reviews and user-contributed reliability databses for different drives. I don't see a lot of data for the seagates there, and the data hasn't been updated recently. They do say in reviews:

Low Power - Thankfully for consumers the green drive space has three very solid entries that when on sale, are all valid choices. However, we have favorites - for always-on applications like home servers, the Seagate Barracuda LP is a nice choice due to its lowest in class idle power consumption and the Western Digital Caviar Green earns a nod for high reliability. The fifth generation Caviar Green, which come in 2.5TB and 3TB capacities, while if you want to take the step up to a 4TB drive, look at the new 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000.